Free schools: first facts on the ground

Michael Gove has devised ingenious means of hiring more than his share of political advisers, sponsoring thinktanks and bringing Conservative people in as officials. This week's news would suggest his many spinners and strategists have been earning their crust. While the government groans in its grim mission to slash in every direction, and as a ghost of a health secretary resurrects a derided bill, the man in charge of English education appears to dwell in a parallel universe of social expansion. On Wedndesday he will cut the ribbon on one of his much-vaunted free schools, part of a first clutch which have been opening their doors this week.

There is no doubt this puts him on the right side in the publicity stakes. His critics, including Labour, must remember that a new school will always be a positive story, and will be so in spades where it has been set up at the behest of local parents, even if only a select sample of them. Educational experts may like or loath free school theory, but – starting this week – Mr Gove is creating new facts on the ground and, if past experience is any guide, these are hard to budge. If you doubt it, consider the dogged survival of grammars in parts of the country decades after Whitehall gave up on the unpopular 11-plus; consider, too, the community campaigns which invariably pop up to fight any proposal to close even dire schools.

Free school sceptics have some powerful arguments – not least that £120m has been avoidably drained from the buildings budget of other schools. But the statecraft is cunning: leaking roofs in the maligned "bog-standard" comprehensives may only redouble demands for new alternatives. Settings one's face against particular new schools is thus bad politics; happily the really important debates do not require this. So far, a mere 24 free schools are in business, which experts say will teach a mere 0.05% of the cohort. What matters more than what goes on within these institutions' own walls is what their arrival will do to education elsewhere in the system.

The first thing to watch out for is whether new schools poach pupils in a way that increases segregation, something there were signs of in the Swedish experiment which first inspired Mr Gove. The emerging evidence is contested, with the coalition pointing out that many are sited in the ethnically mixed inner cities, while a Guardian analysis instead emphasised how they were springing up in professional parts of town.

The other big question is quality. For Mr Gove, the great hope is that the mere prospect of competition from parents setting up schools will force education authorities to raise their game. Perhaps, but only if free schools are perceived to be good enough to represent a serious threat. In the US, so-called charter schools have varied wildly in quality across cities and states, and – intriguingly – have produced better results where they are held to officially ordained standards and reliant on renewable funding agreements. There will be something of a paradox if it transpires that to thrive free schools must have their freedom curtailed, yet things could pan out that way. The familiar anxieties have been about zealots rewriting science curriculums, but in fact the direct financial dependence of free schools (and indeed of Labour's academies) on bilateral contracts with the education secretary gives him a whip hand as never before, should he choose to use it.

Mr Gove is sincere in seeking to create space for new styles of teaching, but that doesn't stop him pushing his own priorities, from phonics to English kings, not to mention the new target which he calls the English baccalaureate. Free schools bring many possibilities for good and ill, but what needs to be watched particularly closely is how far they succumb to the latest whims in Whitehall, as they consider where their next contract is coming from.

Politics

Education

UK news

GCSE schools guide

Interactive: This guide is designed to help parents find and research local schools in England. Search by postcode to find which schools offer individual subjects, and compare how they have performed in GCSE exams